My recent book reading has been in the subject of Eemergence, beginning with StevenJouhnson’s book by that name, and continuing in Brabasi’s Linked. The idea that great things emerge/evolve from the first simple organisms interacting, noticing one another, and coalescing to form increasingly sentient, more complex life forms, has me applying this view of “life process” to the Church. It seems this is a paradigm of Pentecost…..that God came down and vistied a people who were engaeged in the work of discernment of the “Next Step”; what form to take as a people, and what work to take up.

I also think of my first exposures to what’s being dubbed “The Emergent Church” and people who are discussing “postmodern thought” and how the Church can respond to this. I met Brian McLaren a little over a week ago at Old Saint George, and was feeling “dejaVU” taking me back to how I felt in my early college days when I was reading about “authentic Christianity” that sought to find renewed meaning in the Church by learning to speak authentically and be more forthcoming about our spiritual journey and dsicover new expressions for celebration and worship.

My “role”; my “calling” in this context is to help the Church to utilize and understand the Web, and other “future” iterations of online communications that may well take us “beyond the Web” (at least as we now know it; “Web” is such a wonderful mythological framework thatit may well follow future online technologies as a identifying label……but , we may be looking at some things we might call “Post-Web”